The Return of Luxury Train Travel: Why Slowing Down Is the New Premium

A flight from Delhi to Mumbai takes about two hours. The Rajdhani Express takes roughly sixteen. The Maharajas' Express — one of India's luxury tourist trains — takes about four days, meandering through Rajasthan with stops at palaces, forts, and desert camps. The ticket costs approximately what a good used car costs. And it's usually booked out months in advance.

This makes no logical sense if you view travel purely as transportation — getting from A to B efficiently. It makes perfect sense if you view travel as experience, and if you've noticed that efficiency has strip-mined a lot of joy from modern life. Luxury train travel is booming precisely because it's the opposite of everything contemporary travel has become: slow, deliberate, analog, and gloriously inefficient.

Why Trains Are Having a Moment

Several forces converge. Flight shame (flygskam, as the Scandinavians call it) has made some travelers self-conscious about their carbon footprint, and trains are genuinely lower-carbon — roughly 6-8 times less CO2 per passenger-kilometer than flights for equivalent distances. The pandemic accelerated a desire for slower, more controlled travel environments where you're not sealed in a tube with 200 strangers breathing recycled air.

But the biggest driver, I think, is simpler than environmental guilt or pandemic anxiety: trains are more enjoyable. You see the landscape. You watch the world change gradually — from plains to hills to desert — rather than vanishing into clouds at takeoff and reappearing somewhere else at landing. There's a physical continuity to train travel that connects you to geography in a way that flying literally cannot.

The Best Train Journeys (Actually Worth the Premium)

India: The Maharajas' Express and Palace on Wheels. Both operate in Rajasthan and offer a level of luxury historically reserved for actual maharajas. Multi-day itineraries with off-train excursions to Jaipur, Jodhpur, Udaipur, and Agra. The cabins are extravagant — think mahogany, silk, personal butlers. Starting around ₹4-5 lakh per person for a week. Expensive? Enormously. But the experience combines luxury accommodation, curated cultural experiences, and transportation into a single seamless package.

Japan: Shinkansen meets luxury. Japan's bullet trains are famously efficient but not typically luxurious. The exception is the Shiki-Shima (Train Suite), a ten-car luxury train that crosses Honshu and Hokkaido with suites that include cypress-wood bathtubs and French-Japanese fusion dining. At roughly ₹8-12 lakh for a four-day journey, it's one of the most expensive train experiences in the world. Bookings are lottery-based due to demand.

Europe: The Venice Simplon-Orient-Express. The most storied luxury train in the world, connecting London to Venice via Paris. Art Deco carriages restored to 1920s splendor. Starting around ₹3-4 lakh per person for the London-Venice route. The experience is less about the destination and entirely about the journey — cocktails in the piano bar, multi-course dinners in wood-paneled dining cars, waking up to Alpine scenery sliding past your window.

India's Emerging Train Culture

Beyond the luxury segment, India is investing heavily in train travel that sits between the Rajdhani and the Maharajas' Express. The Vande Bharat trains — India's semi-high-speed rail — offer comfortable, efficient rail travel that's making train journeys genuinely competitive with flights for distances under 600 km. The Delhi-Varanasi route, for instance, now takes roughly 8 hours on Vande Bharat, compared to 12-14 hours on the older Shatabdi. With comfortable seats and onboard meals included, it's a viable alternative for travelers who value the journey as part of the experience.

IRCTC's Buddhist Circuit Tourist Train and the Deccan Odyssey in Maharashtra represent mid-range luxury options — more accessible than the Maharajas' Express but significantly elevated from standard rail travel. These trains are often overlooked by Indian travelers who default to flying, but they offer experiences that no flight can match: the Western Ghats unfolding through your window, pre-dawn arrivals in station towns that smell of chai and diesel, the particular social environment of train compartments where strangers talk to each other in a way that airplane passengers never do.

The Real Luxury

Here's what I think the luxury train trend is really about, beneath the mahogany and the multi-course dinners: time. In an economy that prices everything by efficiency, choosing to spend sixteen hours on a journey that could take two is a radical act. It declares that your time isn't primarily an economic resource to be optimized — it's your life, and you get to decide how to spend it.

That's a luxury no airline can offer, regardless of how fancy their business class suites become. The jet takes you there faster. The train takes you there better. And increasingly, people with the means to choose are choosing better over faster — which might be the most encouraging travel trend in years.